


in this room, a wilderness

by arbitrarily



Category: A Place of Greater Safety - Hilary Mantel
Genre: Consensual Infidelity, F/M, Infidelity, M/M, Threesome In Absentia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-13
Updated: 2018-04-13
Packaged: 2019-04-15 00:57:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14148432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/arbitrarily/pseuds/arbitrarily
Summary: That's all a revolution is, to circle and to spin around another.





	in this room, a wilderness

**Author's Note:**

> Set somewhere amorphously in 1792 and 1793. Title taken from the song ["Belong" by Editors](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=192i66_2m6k) that I listened to basically on repeat while writing this.

 

                      Drink all the sex there is.  
Still die.  
ANNE CARSON

 

A wilderness is in me.  
EDITORS

 

 

_A brief history of undocumented truths and half-truths,_ 1792 —

 

His skin smells like a butcher’s. Gabrielle has never smelled the skin of a butcher before, neither this close nor this intimately, but beside her, sweat-damp and as sated as temporary moments and her body can yield, Georges, she thinks, stinks of it. The city stinks of it. Blood, flesh. Meat. This is what freedom gathers, sharp bayonets to a shredded breast. She might as well take Legendre to bed. She might as well carve herself open, too.

 

 

Danton and Gabrielle sleep in separate beds. It is a well-known fact; the revolution occupies their bedroom. It passes through, they pass, watchful and curious, even as their thoughts are dedicated to larger, more important issues. 

“Perhaps,” Camille says, “she aspires merely to make it through the night, well-rested and unmolested.”

Lucile is in bed alongside Camille, her bare legs thrown over his. The revolution occupies their bedroom as well, but to them it is less like an invasion and more like the dregs of an exhausted party, spilling champagne-soaked from room to room. They are alone tonight. She scratches at his thigh like a cat. “I can’t imagine why,” she says, the grin audible in her voice.

Camille tips his head back to look down at her. “You crave no rest?” he teases.

She stretches, supine and languid, naked. She treasures these, their nights together as a married couple. When they occupy the same space, and only them — a rarity as both time and the revolution progress — their bodies crushed against each other in their bed, attempting to fill as little space as possible. Attempting to crawl and live inside each other. As each other. “To desire so willingly to go untouched. It’s unthinkable.”

Camille drags a hand through her hair. “Untouched by one’s husband, or by Gabrielle’s?”

“It’s unthinkable,” she repeats.

 

 

Lucile: Annette had told me to behave. She said it as if I should consider it a condition of my marriage. A dowry, perhaps. 

She told me also to pay attention. This I have always done. She thinks she knows my husband better than I do, and perhaps at one point in time she had. But I have outpaced. I know my husband. 

I know his friends, too. 

For insistence, I know how Danton likes his women: easy with their affections and humor, generous in breast and coquetry. Camille, despite his proclivities, likes only me. My mother too, as it were. 

Camille would never hurt me, but Danton, Georges — I invite the unimaginable. First in my head and next my body. He has already taken up residence in my heart, slotted alongside Camille, the scant space he allows, would not allow, but for anyone other than Georges.

It is most inappropriate, I know it, for a woman to want a married man lest he is her husband. The lines are smudged when the want is shared, indulged by both husband and wife, for the same man.

 

 

Danton is drunk, or at the least, well on his way. His face is reddening, his scars livid and white, his mouth hard even as he relaxes into the drink. Fabre might as well join him. Camille does as well.

Fabre believes himself to be a man who makes men. He is not unlike other storytellers in this regard. He confuses creation with ownership, and as such, is often disappointed — possessively, paternally — in his men he made. Men who will forget what happens when the new order becomes the old. Men who make for better rebels than kings.

He regards Danton as he speaks, regaling them with the differences between the taste of farm girl versus aristocrat. He licks his fingers, lewd and dramatic, always performing. All the world a stage, et cetera, et cetera. He watches as Camille laughs. Fabre shakes his head.

You great beast, he thinks fondly of Danton. You irascible ass. 

 

 

FABRE: You have the most undiscriminating palate for cunt. A democratic connoisseur.   
DANTON: Speak carefully; you’ll inspire envy in our Camille.  
FABRE: In which capacity?  
DANTON: That the renown is not his own, but mine, of course.  
FABRE: So it’s of that which you speak.  
CAMILLE: And you both speak as if I am not seated here. You speak as if the renown is not but one more thing we share.  
FABRE: Clever tongues — I trust you share those, too.

 

 

Camille watches Danton with Lucile, the three alone in the Desmoulins’ apartment. Danton brushes hair back from Lucile’s face. Her own hands flutter about his forearms, as if she has forgotten the next sequence of steps in this dance. Danton meets Camille’s eye over her head. Camille is flushed. He flushes so easy. 

His gentleness is a trick, Camille is sure. But it is not Lucile he strives to deceive nor is it Camille’s audience. It is himself. A man masked to his true nature.

Camille’s gaze shifts from Danton to his wife, back again. How proprietary, how possessive Danton is with Lucile, in particular when there is someone else to witness it. When there is Camille. Camille isn’t stupid; he recognizes the impulse in how Danton’s fingers close around the back of Lucile’s neck, grip her waist, hold her to him before Camille as if to say: if I wanted it, she’d be mine. 

It is a staggering work of historical revision, bereft of any self-awareness. 

Though with Camille — Danton’s hands on him, an arm slung around his shoulders, a wide palm cradling his skull — it would be the truth. 

 

 

Camille: I write down the truth, and I wait for someone to come and cross it out. 

The truth: everything I have achieved was derived from a split-second decision. They call it passion, call it rage, _les aristocrates à la lanterne, les aristocrates, on les pendra!_ And now, we lead — with vision, if not foresight. 

The truth: It does not matter how carefully you craft a legacy and a name. It comes down to what is done in a single moment of time.

I tell Danton this, and he says to me: your name, your name, Camille's fucking name. Only Danton reminds me of how selfish a man I am.How difficult it is to impress someone you have grown alongside rather than in spite of, without some great absence endured. It is a bit like a marriage, I suppose, and in that, I am bound to two. 

 

 

It was Danton. _Listen: it’s Danton_ , Camille would say. The politic made intractably personal; he would not say that part. He would say: The voice of the people was not that of the King and the Queen. It was Danton’s, making all of Paris, the earth, tremble beneath their feet. Listen.

 

 

A Paris without Danton is a city not worth living. Raze it to the ground.

This was what Camille had thought, after Danton had fled to England.

He will return. He will return. He cannot leave us. He would not leave us.

This was what Lucile had thought.

Fucked by my own reputation, thought George-Jacques Danton. In England, he was asked if he was prepared for all he might return to once he reached Paris. He had smacked the man’s shoulder with the flat of his hand and grinned. “Not a fucking clue, good friend, and in the mystery? Lives the joy.” Fuck it all, he had thought. Fuck them all. And then he had returned. 

 

 

A conversation between Georges-Jacques Danton and Camille Desmoulins, or a conversation between a bloodthirsty opportunist (per Camille Desmoulins) and a cold-blooded cynic (per Georges-Jacques Danton):

“And where might Lucile be at present?” This is Danton.

“Abed.” This Camille.

“Alone, I should imagine. Alas.”

Camille says nothing. Camille has positioned himself between Danton and the door. Camille constantly finds himself caught between two points. Two people. As difficult a position as being caught between two competing ideals. Camille as the elastic rubber drawing them together, slackening, allowing them to spring apart. Danton and Max. Annette and Lucile. The Camille he fears himself to be and the Camille that Danton sees. Danton and Lucile. 

“And how would you like it if it was your wife I came so persistently for?” The question is idle. An empty glass hangs from Camille’s lax hand. For two men who are all words, they say more to each other with silence, with their bodies, than their overworked mouths.

The breathless way Danton starts to laugh is the lightest thing about him. It’s the lightest, the softest, thing he is capable of. The fire flickers behind him where he stands, where he turns to look at Camille over his shoulder. “That,” he says, “is an easy question.”

“And the easy answer?”

He approaches. He claps the width of a heavy, hot palm to the side of Camille’s throat before withdrawing just as quickly. “I’d have your head.”

 

 

These are the things that are said about Lucile Desmoulins and George-Jacques Danton:

_Danton sleeps not in his wife’s cold bed, but in Citizen Desmoulins’s bed — with Citizeness Desmoulins.  
_ “She flaunts it, shameless, truly, plastering herself to him in front of her own husband.”  
“I saw him press his mouth to her neck and I saw M. Desmoulins watching. He didn’t do a thing but watch. He watched!”  
_Citizen Danton speaks to the general welfare, the moral strength of a French people who rule themselves, while he himself stomps down a path paved with infamy into his fellow comrades’ boudoirs, taking wives as war prizes. Shall we allow this? Shall we react as Citizen Desmoulins and grant him leave of our wives?_  
“You’ve seen how he looks at her. No, no, Mme., not like he wishes to eat her. But as if he already has.”

Lucile knows. It is irrelevant whether he has bedded her or not. Who was actually at the Bastille when it fell. Who took down the King and the Queen and who ordered the killings in September and who now tries to swallow remorse like gravel scraped up from the bloodied streets. It matters only what they put down in print and what the public elects to believe. They believe her his, and so, that is what she is. 

There are other men they speak of. Lucile’s stable of kept admirers and supposed lovers. Camille fucks his while Lucile flirts, maliciously. They say the men that are Lucile’s are Camille’s as well. Fréron and General Dillon and Hérault. And Danton. Danton, Danton, Danton. 

Reclined alongside him, she traces a line down first the length and then the width of his thick neck, bisecting him. The cat weaves and bats at the door and Danton settles his face against her breast. She waits for Jeanette’s entrance. She waits for interruption. Someone is always sweeping in to save her from what comes next.

 

 

ROBESPIERRE: I believe not a word.  
CAMILLE: More fool you are then, my friend.

 

 

A different evening:

His scarred lips press to her opened palm. She shivers, imagines their wrongness against softer parts of her own body. Her mouth.

“You play dangerous,” she says to him. This is a statement of obvious fact and they both recognize it. She presses her kissed palm to his ravaged face.

“You tease rough,” he says. “I only aim to match you, stroke for stroke, Lolotte.”

Lucile pushes him away, laughing lighter than she feels. Georges, unlike Camille, has a way of making her own body feel as heavy as his own. Aching to be full.

He reaches for her.

“Come to bed with me.”

“Suppose I should say yes this time. What would happen then?”

She looks down, where her hand rests in his. The obscenity of his large hand, his long thick fingers passing over her own, tracing along bone, down in between them, down into the lines of her palm. “I would fuck you.”

Color suffuses her pale skin despite herself. 

“Yes, and then what?”

“I would fuck you again. I’d fuck you for as long as you would allow me and more like than not find I still have an appetite for more.”

“And Camille?”

His hand stills. “What of Camille?”

“I wonder, would you take him, too.”

He drops her hand. “You tease me. You take a man’s hope, and his ego, and this is what you do with them. Juggle them high above your head and forget they are made of glass.”

“I don’t tease, I merely wonder.”

“You wonder about taking me to bed?”

“Yes.”

“You wonder about me taking Camille to bed?”

“Yes.”

He rises. He looks down at her.

“You women. You have too much time for idle thought.”

“Yes. Yes, we do.”

 

 

Backlit by the fire, the hour is late. Someday when all this is over, he will look fondly back on these times. Only that is not true: Camille does not know better to think that these times, these captured and cloistered moments shared with Danton, will ever end. It is the present; he refuses to imagine a future that deviates from this.

“Are you still faithful to her?” The fire lit behind Danton crackles and rustles. He must be tired: the conversation always deviates from Paris, from politics and Robespierre and the Committee, and arrives at Lucile when he has given himself over to an exhausted, devilish belligerence. 

Camille snorts. “Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to. It makes you intolerable.”

“No. No, you haven’t.” Even when Danton’s voice is quiet, as close to subdued as a man like him can know it, it still carries weight. It’s heavy, a final pronouncement.

“Insufferable,” Camille says. “You think you understand our marriage.”

“Yes. I think I understand it perfectly.”

“Have you been faithful to Lucile?”

Danton grins. “Yes, Camille. In the only way I know how.”

“Do you tell my wife that you love her?”

“No.”

“Because it would be a lie?”

“Camille.”

“Have you been faithful to me?”

“Camille,” he says again, eyes fixed on him. As soft as a crushing embrace.

 

 

Frustration is obvious in Danton’s body, his words, his posture. Lucile thinks it unrelated to her until he makes it about her.

“You toy with me,” Danton is saying. Same tact as always, a different word this time. There is a hint of the nasty cruelty that lives under his skin. He has never applied it to her before. It fascinates. As if viewing him from a wrong and different angle, a man changed yet still the same. Who he has always been but not the man he has ever been with her. She could be one of his Cordeliers who take to the street to witness him, gazing up at a body too large to be mere mortal, a face too touched by violence to belong to anyone but the man who opened the gates to revolution. These men, her men, Camille and Danton, are rarely the myths they occupy in the streets when alone, enclosed, with her. Perhaps, she thinks, I strip them down. 

“I would never dare.” A toy is not the same as a game, she thinks. In a game, there is a stake to be won. Georges’s face is flushed, burning red down his exposed throat, cravat discarded.

He had come to her bullish this evening, fixing for a fight. He paces the room before her, a caged creature. She reclines back on the chaise lounge and watches him. 

“What would you do if I was any other woman?” she asks him. Poking the bear.

“I would have you spread beneath me already.” His impatience is drawn that much tighter; she can hear it. He is not a man who abides hypotheticals. 

“Imagine I am any other woman.” She is well-aware the figure she strikes; she greedily watches the bob of his throat as he swallows.

“Impossible.”

Lucile lies back on the chaise lounge, her body arranged carelessly. For consumption. Curious — she is seducing him as much as he has ever seduced her. He comes to her, easy as anything. He places his hand on her bent leg, over her dress, threatening to climb higher. 

“You treat me like your dog. Your pet.” The low warning rumble of his voice carries from his body into hers. She widens her legs.

“Are you not?”

Something settles darkly over his face before softening, dawning with some private realization. He leans his weight into her and she can’t breathe. His hand rests flat and insistent along the inside of her knee, her skirts rucking up, legs opening as he settles between them. And here it is: the point of no return. She has rounded the corner, she has taken up arms, she has sliced through flesh and drawn blood. There will be no return to procedure. There is no procedure for what comes next.

The knowing glint in his eye is belied by an uncharacteristic quiet desperation of him. He does not press his mouth to hers. Not yet. 

“I am yours?” he asks her. 

She answers him. She rises up to catch his mouth with hers. 

 

 

He brings her off with his hand. It’s not that he’s a generous lover. Lucile knows better than to dare think Danton gives without any expectation as to what he might take. “A filthy, unholy opportunist,” Camille had called him. His face glowed pink with the endearment. 

He isn’t wrong. Danton isn’t generous, but he is proud. Hungry. He could dine off the spike in a woman’s pulse beneath his fingers, his mouth, the heady rush of too-hot blood boiling to the surface. It’s but another way for him to make his mark — have these women break themselves against the rocks of him. Lucile is different; Lucile is everything. 

She feels filthy and wrung out and she has yet to have his cock inside her. Her breasts are slick with sweat — his, hers; his spit. He bites at her, and she shudders. Georges is smug but impatient with her. Rough with her body, holding her open and down. His fingers filling her, swapped out without prelude for his cock.

Her body goes still, every part of her still, as she tries to yield, as anyone who has ever met him, tries to yield around him. As he makes you feel every aching, demanding inch of him. 

“Oh,” she might say when he is fully — _finally_ — seated in her. There are, she will tell Camille later, no words.

There are none for him either. Picture Georges-Jacques Danton, reduced to this — the booming provocateur’s voice scraped down to a grasping, breathless plea: her name. Her name he gave her. “Lolotte,” he says into the curve of her throat.

After, he strokes the side of her breast with the back of his hand. “You will tell Camille.” It’s not a question. Lucille takes hold of his wrist and drags his hand down her body, down between her legs. She aches, still. She’s sticky and wet with his spend and her hips still arch and roll when he touches her, swollen and sore and pink. 

“I’ll show him the evidence,” she says, a perfect lawyer. She inclines her head towards his, her mouth tipped below his. “Perhaps I will have him eat you.”

And Camille does, he will. He will return home within the hour, Georges-Jacques returned to his own home, but not before he will take Lucile’s mouth with his and plead, “I did not think it possible to crave you more,” to which she will bite his lip and say, teasing, always teasing, “Leave me then and burn.” And then — it will be Camille. Camille on his knees, Lucile nude and in repose upon their bed bedecked with angels. Georges will have fucked her again before leaving her, too much and too soon, the pain an irresistible part of the game she had failed to consider the merits of. She will have Georges fresh inside her. She will have a reddening bite mark on her breast. She will open her legs to her husband and say: I have discovered new territory. I have learned the cock does match the man.

“You poor thing,” Camille will groan before he sinks to devour her. To devour him.

 

 

CAMILLE: I believe in equality. I worship at the altar of balance.  
DANTON: So says the godless sodomite.  
CAMILLE: Such words you choose. Have I sunk too low into the drink? Might you actually be Hébert and my vision is the first casualty in this war waged by vice?  
DANTON: I cannot fathom who you aim to insult more — myself or Hébert.  
CAMILLE: You fucked Lucile.  
DANTON: Myself it is.  
CAMILLE: No denials?  
DANTON: None. I did. I have. I pray only to fuck her more.  
CAMILLE: So says the godless philandering thug.  
DANTON: I believe the epithet you seek is the Minister of Justice.  
CAMILLE: Yes. You are well-versed then, the balanced scales of justice.  
DANTON: Is that your aim? To fashion me as Lady Justice? First blindfold me and then fuck me, call it the people’s will?  
CAMILLE: I had considered only the latter, my will alone. It would, after all, only be fair.

It would, he does not say, only be all I have wanted. We all wish to lay claim to those we love.

 

 

Tell me everything, Lucile will beg. Tell me what you did to him.

 

 

What Camille does is fuck him. 

No one but Camille has ever, or would ever, describe Danton as easy, but here he is. He is on his back, on his bed. His wife’s, Gabrielle’s, rests empty and lonely beside them. Camille is on his knees before him. Camille has Danton’s cock bare before him. He eyes it, can’t help the smirk that tries his mouth. His jaw aches already. He grips the base of it, makes note of the jump of muscle in Danton’s thighs, and he offers a silent acknowledgment to the women of Paris who have braved this beast — his wife included.

“Lolotte did not exaggerate,” he says. He looks up at Danton through his lashes. That big chest expands as he inhales sharply. Danton says nothing. He watches Camille as if he is tempted to close his eyes but fears what he may miss.

Camille says: “When I fucked her, after you, she slipped her fingers in, alongside my cock. She said she wanted it to feel like when you fucked her.”

“Christ, fuck, Camille.”

“I wasn’t insulted,” he says, idly, a truth said more to himself than to Danton. “I thought I understood the appeal.” He drags his hand up and down his cock, already leaking over his fist. “I understand it better now.”

Camille rewards him, for the noises he makes, and he sucks only at the head of his cock. He’s too much, Danton must know it, but he bucks his hips, tries to ride his mouth, expects Camille to take it. And he does; of course he does. Camille drags his mouth down, his chest tight, head spinning, as he licks at his balls, while he taps lightly, experimentally, at his asshole. Danton’s entire body twitches. He rubs him there, increasing the pressure, his mouth continuing to lap at him, the base of his cock, his balls, the skin behind, where his fingers press and attempt to enter. Danton’s breath comes nearly as loud as Camille’s tongue laving wet at him.

Camille pulls back and looks up Danton’s body. He’s hideous — the scarred face, heavy-lidded eyes, skin flushed red. It’s beautiful.

“Tell me what you did to her.” The soft way he says it, it is more an invitation than a command. Had Danton said it, then it would have taken on that force. From Camille, from Camille to Danton, everything he says is a needy kind of plea. 

Danton drags in a heavy breath. “I made her come on my hand.” Camille hums under his breath. He takes up Danton’s right hand.

“How many fingers?” he asks.

Danton extends two fingers. Camille sucks on them. He listens to the harsh noise that leaves Danton’s mouth, less words than animal sound. Then, he works two of his own fingers into Danton. Danton’s entire body heaves with it, body tight with tension. 

“What else?” Camille asks.

“I sucked at her breast,” Danton says. Confessional, he the penitent. They’ll bastardize all of religion, if it was up to Camille. 

Camille drags his teeth over Danton’s nipple and his body lurches up under Camille’s. He does it again, liking the caged animal ferocity of the body beneath him. He stretches his fingers inside him.

“Do you think you could come like this?”

“Camille, please.” He is unused to such wanton begging from Danton. In fact, he cannot think of a precedent for it. It has always been Camille who whines and who pleads and Danton who stomps forward, implacable. 

As if to prove such a thought, that Danton is not one to take anything laying down, not even this, he grabs Camille by the hair. He leans in, as if expecting this. I know you, Camille thinks, breathes into each sloppy collision of their mouths. Nothing you can do to me would surprise me. Nothing you can do to me I would not invite.

When Camille finally fucks him, it is the surreality of the moment he cannot escape. Danton is vulnerable under him, near docile. Taking and taking and taking, but that has always been Georges, he thinks. This entire city believes he gave them a revolution, that he gave them freedom, but he knows, and Danton knows, all he has ever done is take. Opportunity, the space between spread legs, an offered cache of kickbacks and quiet cuts, ten years of Camille’s life. Ten years and his wife and any and all the emptiness Camille has ever allowed to live within himself. Danton took it all. He took France. He took their history, and most like, their future. At least, he knows, that is what Lucile thinks.

“Whatever comes next will come from him,” she has said. “And for that, I trust it.”

She trusts him. Camille leans forward and draws his mouth to Danton. Danton too lost, too far gone for coordination, his mouth gasping open beneath Camille’s. _Camille, please_. He wants to hear him say it again, he wants to hear him say it, he wants — “Camille, please.” 

 

 

DANTON: Have you yet proven your point?  
CAMILLE: Lie back down. Let me take a look at you. 

 

 

He comes back to her. Of course he comes back to her. Georges is rougher, more punishing with Lucile. She does not share this with Camille. She knows Georges wants him to know, but she wants this brutality for herself. She will share, piecemeal, what he has done to her. Camille will witness it on her body, the marks he leaves behind as evidence. As a legacy.

The man Camille describes is different from the man who beds her. He is merciless with her, as if payback for the long wait to arrive here. She thrills off it. So unlike Camille. So what she had hoped — that big hand closing over her throat, the bruising grip of her hip. Camille will trace the marks he leaves her with after he has gone though her body keeps trembling in his wake. Georges makes her come so hard she cries, though not the way she cries with Camille — softly, sweetly, with great wonder and love — but because it is too much. Because her body rebels, and like his, it wants more and more and more, outside the boundaries and the body’s feeble capabilities.

She loves this ruthlessness in him. She opens her body to it. She trusts it. 

Guilt is a faraway specter but she watches its approach. The closer it arrives, the more tangible it becomes. She fears to see it take on the shape of her husband. Camille. It does not. She should have known better. It’s Gabrielle.

Over breakfast each morning, Gabrielle is there. Lucile cannot look at her. She cannot look to Georges’s hands. Those thick fingers, he has pushed them past her lips, down her throat, a bid to silence her that only makes her body pulse and thrum the louder. 

She relays this to Camille until he presses his mouth to hers and begs, “No more, no more.” This is right to her. She has only ever known two men. She cannot envision ever knowing more. She likes to imagine the both of them inside her, simultaneously. Together. It is like this she hopes to die.

 

 

Annette: Such a silly, silly stupid child.  
Mme Roland: She is a most obliging, accommodating girl. Yes, most accommodating.  
Gabrielle: I dare not trust myself to speak her name for fear I will betray my anger.  
Danton: Lolotte, Lolotte, _Lolotte_ —

CAMILLE: Lolotte.  
LUCILE: My love. Come to me. 

 

 

Eventually they will all run out of time for all the things that go unsaid. She knows this. Camille must know this, for why else would he write so furiously? The pages fluttering about him, his hand smeared with ink, waving it at her as he promises _later, later, later_ , because some things can wait but not this, his work. His words. And Danton must know, too, for why else does he take to every overturned crate, each set podium and bully pulpit the same way a gladiator eyes the waiting ring. They will run out of time, but not the words. 

There are always words. 

“I am yours?” he had asked her.

In their sitting room, their bodies poised on the chaise lounge, an illicit tableau to anyone who might spy them. He had already tested her body with his weight. She would take it. She would take him inside her. You belong to me same as you belong to Camille, she did not say. She held Georges’s face in her hands, rested her forehead to his. You belong to me. You belong to us. And in turn, we are yours. It is the deal. There is no other bargain to be made. 

“Yes,” was what she said to him. “Yes.” And then she kissed him.

_Listen_.

 

 

Danton: What does a man do when he gets what he wants? He finds something more to hunt. To crave. In his personal papers, he does not write the following. He was trained a lawyer and it is with a lawyer’s foresight for future self-incrimination that he does not record any of it. Any of them. Or, it is because, unlike Camille, he does not have the words, he never did, merely the voice. These are not thoughts to bellow but to secret away. To build an appetite, same as you gather kindling and stoke the flame.

I know the taste of her flesh now, he does not write. I know the taste of his, too. Neither are sweet, but they cling to the tongue. To my wife, this morning I said, how I thirst and I hunger. She said, of you and yours I expect nothing less. 

 

 

 


End file.
